In trying to defend the government’s lawful access legislation last year, then public safety minister Vic Toews said that Canadians can either “stand with us, or with the child pornographers.” Given that the proposed Internet-spying legislation was incredibly unpopular, this statement didn’t sit well with many people. Surely law-abiding citizens could object to living in an online surveillance state without siding with child pornographers.

Indeed, the backlash against the Tories’ lawful access legislation was so harsh the last time around, they eventually promised the shelve the idea for good.

“We will not be proceeding with Bill C-30 and any attempts that we will continue to have to modernize the Criminal Code will not contain the measures contained in C-30,” said former justice minister Rob Nicholson in February. “We’ve listened to the concerns of Canadians who have been very clear on this.”

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. The Conservative strategy appears to have been to lay low for awhile, pick another cause de jure and reintroduce the legislation under a different name.

“Our Government is committed to ensuring that our children are safe from online predators and from online exploitation,” Justice Minister Peter MacKay said in a statement last week. “We have an obligation to help put an end to harmful online harassment and exploitation.”

Nowhere did his office mention that preventing cyber-bullying meant spying on Canadians and cracking down on online speech, but that’s exactly what the bill introduced in the House of Commons last week would do. Now we have the choice of standing with the government, or with the cyber-bullies; a false dichotomy that will see our online activities subjected to even more scrutiny by government officials than they already are.

The bill does indeed make it an offence to distribute “revenge porn,” or intimate images of someone without their consent. But it goes much further by saying that, “Everyone commits an offence who, without lawful excuse and with intent to harass a person, repeatedly communicates, or causes repeated communications to be made, with them by a means of telecommunication.”

This is incredibly vague language that could criminalize many of the letters that appear in my inbox, as well as those that might end up being delivered to an MP’s constituency office.

Shortly after expunging the speech provisions from the human rights code, the Tories have also taken this opportunity to launch a full-scale assault on Internet speech. The bill not only makes it easier for law-enforcement officials to find out what we are saying online, it also broadens the definition of hate propaganda and criminalizes software that could be used to gain unlawful access to telecommunications services.

This potentially means that anyone writing or downloading a piece of software, even if it isn’t used in an unlawful manner, could be convicted of an offence. The same does not apply for law-enforcement agencies, however, which would be given broad powers to track people using the location data on their mobile phones, and access to metadata relating to who Canadians are communicating with.

Anyone convicted of a cyber-bullying offence not only faces a lengthy jail term under the proposed legislation, they also could have their computer privileges revoked by the state. The bill would give judges the power to ban an offender from using the Internet, and to seize his computer, cellphone and other electronic devices, which, in the Internet age, is akin to preventing someone from picking up a pen.

One of the more troubling parts of the bill encourages Internet service providers (ISPs) and other telecommunications companies to disclose customer information to the government without a warrant, and gives them legal immunity from any criminal or civil charges arising from such disclosures.

We already know that the NSA has forced companies such as Google and Yahoo! to hand over subscriber information. This bill entrenches the practice here at home, by ensuring companies will not face any legal ramifications for violating the privacy rights of their customers.

It’s true that this cyber-bullying bill leaves out some of the more egregious parts of the previous lawful access legislation, including warrantless surveillance and forcing ISPs to install costly monitoring equipment on their networks.

But this has largely become a moot point, since we now know that Communications Security Establishment Canada, in concert with the NSA and spy agencies in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, are monitoring huge swaths of Internet traffic.

What this bill does is allow domestic law-enforcement agencies to gather much of the same data as our spy agency already does. It also cements into law the practice of governments getting access to private information stored on corporate servers, without going through the trouble of having to obtain a court order.

It would appear as though the culture of deceit inside the Tory caucus extends far beyond who knew what and when about secret payments to Mike Duffy. The cyber-bullying bill is largely a cut-and-paste job from legislation that had been rejected by the Canadian public, and which the government had promised never to reintroduce. It limits our freedom and violates our right to privacy. Canadians should not stand for this.